Ana María Caballero’s Paperwork

Given the open-ended prompt to manipulate a Le Random editorial page as a blank canvas, Ana María Caballero shares the intimate infrastructure of her project, Paperwork.

‍Paperwork, released in partnership with Bright Moments, is a performance-based, long-form generative AI collection of digital paper sculptures carved from individual emotional responses to the spoken-word poetry of Ana María Caballero.

Throughout 2023, Caballero performed her poems at numerous venues across the world, inviting audience members to write down one word in response to her verse on sheets of paper.  The words they inscribed represent the multivalent emotional reactions that poetry elicits. One audience member left an origami swan.

She gathered these slips of paper—these distilled, private moments of connection to her readings—and used each word to summon Paperwork’s compositions from latent space, honoring paper’s haptic eloquence and materializing lived experiences via the digital form.  She was so moved by the small pieces of paper and by the swan that she focused her image creation on origami to honor paper’s eloquence—presenting paper as the message in and of itself, not solely as messenger. 

The 100 digital paper sculptures that conform Paperwork capture performances at NFT Show Europe in Valencia, at Bright Moments Gallery and at NeueHouse Hollywood in Los Angeles and at Casas Riegner Gallery in Bogotá. 

Caballero created separate long-form generative AI sub-series to honor each city, rooting the works in the architectural elements of each place.
‍

Bogotá

For the Bogotá series, Caballero invoked the forms of Colombia’s legendary Rogelio Salmona and the gray, tropical palettes of this mountain top city, spangled with buildings built of rust, ochre and vermilion colored bricks. 

‍

‍

Valencia

For the Valencia works, Caballero referenced the structures and breezy color schema of Maestro Santiago Calatrava, who created this location’s iconic Ciudad de las Artes y de las Ciencias.

‍

‍

Los Angeles–NeueHouse Hollywood and Bright Moments Venice Beach

The sculptures grounded in Los Angeles evoke elements of California Modernism as well as warm yellows and deep Pacific blues.

‍

‍


---



‍Ana María Caballero is a first-generation Colombian-American poet and artist. Her work explores how biology delimits societal and cultural rites, ripping the veil from romanticized motherhood and questioning notions that package a woman’s sacrifice as a virtue. She’s the recipient of the Beverly International Prize, Colombia’s José Manuel Arango National Poetry Prize, the Steel Toe Books Poetry Prize and a Sevens Foundation Grant. Her work has been widely published and exhibited internationally.

Special thanks to Operating System and Peter Bauman (Monk Antony).